Washington

NASA centres are being told to reach out to universities in a bid to sharpen their research edge.

As a first step, the space agency is seeking a Californian university to conduct multidisciplinary research and engineering under contract to its Ames Research Center, near San Francisco.

The arrangement is expected to form part of a wider drive by NASA to contract out more of its research and engineering to universities and private companies. New NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe, and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), where he used to work, have each made a public priority of "competitive sourcing" of government activities.

Drawing on expertise: NASA's university-linked centre will be part of its planned research park. Credit: NASA

NASA is planning to set up a University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) near Ames, a type of arrangement pioneered by the Department of Defense in facilities such as the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in which the centre performs specific research tasks under contract to the sponsor.

The planned centre would focus on areas such as information technology, biotechnology, astrobiology and nanotechnology. Located nearby in a still-to-be-developed NASA Research Park, the UARC would work in close collaboration with what the project's planners call a “lean, civil-service-based core-research centre” at Ames.

NASA hopes that the mix of university faculty, students and NASA researchers at the centre will draw new talent and stimulate multidisciplinary research and education.

The UARC contract would differ in size and scope from NASA's arrangement with the California Institute of Technology to operate the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Whereas the much larger JPL, which has an annual budget of around $1 billion, is encouraged to be entrepreneurial and to seek work from sources other than NASA, the UARC would be more tightly bound to its sponsor, and outside work would be limited.

Ames asked for expressions of interest from universities in February. If the idea moves forward as planned, a formal solicitation for a UARC operator would go out in August, with a contract to be awarded next February. The budget for the UARC is estimated at between $10 million and $20 million for the first year, and $100 million over a five-year period.

NASA and other federal agencies are under pressure to identify jobs that can be transferred to the private sector. In documents accompanying NASA's 2003 budget request earlier this year, the Bush administration scolded the agency for not going far enough in this regard. The documents identified the Ames UARC as a “pathfinder effort” in outsourcing, and said future efforts “may include consolidating some NASA facilities with military installations.”

NASA tried outsourcing some of its in-house research activities in the mid-1990s, by creating “science institutes” affiliated with universities, but had little success (see Nature 380, 7; 1996). Personnel and management issues have proved particularly thorny whenever the subject of privatizing government research jobs is raised. NASA scientists who transferred last year from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, to a new National Space Science and Technology Center affiliated with Alabama universities have retained their civil-service status and benefits.